If your gear has an INDI driver, ARIS runs it.

ARIS Rig OS

The fastest rig is a card you flash. Write ARIS Rig OS to a microSD card with Raspberry Pi Imager, put it in a Raspberry Pi 5, and it boots as a complete rig — nothing to compile, nothing to type. Connect the app and Rig setup takes it from there.

Three kinds of rig

ARIS on NINA

Already have a tuned NINA machine at the scope? The ARIS plug-in for NINA 3.x makes it a rig in your fleet: NINA stays the capture engine, and you plan, run and watch the night from any phone, tablet or browser.

Pick your rig computer

The rig computer lives with the telescope and runs the whole night. Four ways to build one — pick by budget and how much you want running on the rig itself.

Brands ARIS works across

Support comes by ecosystem, not by compatibility list: ARIS speaks INDI, so if the driver exists, the device works — and the standard INDI distribution covers the brands below out of the box. Cameras expose every setting the driver reports — exposure, gain, offset, binning, cooling, USB bandwidth, readout modes; mounts get GoTo, tracking rates, parking, and automated meridian flips with pause-before-flip and post-flip re-centering.

Cameras

Mounts

Alt-az and fork mounts work too: ARIS turns its meridian-flip logic off for them.

Focusers, wheels & the rest of the train

Flat panels & covers

Flat panels aren’t an afterthought here — they’re one of the most requested integrations in the hobby and a first-class ARIS device: the flat wizard calibrates brightness and exposure per filter, sequences shoot flats on your schedule, and capture is cover-aware so a closed panel never silently ruins a run.

The rest of the imaging train

ARIS manages eight device types across your rig. Beyond the camera and mount:

All-sky cameras

One fisheye camera pointed at the sky gives ARIS ground truth: live cloud detection painted on the planning chart, a measured clear-or-overcast sky state, calibrated sky-quality (SQM) readings, and smart masking that learns your site — trees, buildings, the Moon, and passing aircraft don’t read as clouds. The camera calibrates itself against the stars — a single clear night frame solves its full geometry to about a quarter degree — so pointing markers and cloud positions land where they should. Three ways to bring one, depending on where you’re starting:

The reference camera is a ZWO ASI676MC class raw-sensor USB astronomy camera behind a fisheye lens — that combination delivers the full measurement set: cloud detection, sky state, and SQM. Many owners repurpose a spare guide-class camera with a fisheye lens instead. Consumer Wi-Fi and security cameras aren’t supported for sky measurements — their IR filters, noise reduction, and compression mean they can’t deliver honest photometry.

No enclosure required for pack-in-nightly setups: a bare camera on a small stand works, and a ~$15 USB dew ring keeps the lens clear on wet nights. Permanent installations keep their weatherproof housings.

On NINA rigs the live fisheye, the sky conditions and your scope’s marker work today; the cloud map and sky-quality readings are coming to NINA.

Smart telescopes

Support for the ZWO Seestar is rolling out now in early access: a Seestar joins your ARIS fleet like any other rig — discovered on your network, monitored from the same dashboard, its images handled alongside the output of your INDI and NINA rigs. Early access means exactly that — capability is expanding. More smart telescopes are planned.

Sprinkler controllers

A backyard rig shares the yard with the irrigation. Pair a supported controller — starting with Rachio — and while a rig is set to Outside, ARIS holds the watering with a rain delay, then lets it resume on its own when the rig comes back in. Pick the schedules that matter and ARIS holds only the controllers they run on, or stand down a whole controller. Built fail-safe: if anything breaks mid-night, it breaks toward keeping the water off.

Software ARIS works with

• INDI — the open driver ecosystem ARIS is built on. No proprietary black box, no hardware lock-in.
• PHD2 — runs on the rig as the guiding engine; ARIS provides the full guide interface on top of it.
• NINA — the ARIS plug-in makes a Windows imaging PC a first-class rig, and ARIS sequences push to NINA’s Advanced Sequencer.
• Telescopius — import saved observing lists (CSV), Autostar tours (.mtf), and mosaic plans with per-pane position angles.

The app side

The ARIS app runs on iPhone and iPad (iOS 15+), Android (7.0+), macOS (a native, notarized Mac app), and the web — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, on phones, tablets, and desktops. No hardware yet? A complete practice observatory is built in — beta invites include the full rig simulator, so you learn every screen before connecting real equipment.

There’s a watch app too: every rig as a Mission Tile — sequence progress, guiding, and Guardian state at a glance — with one-tap pause and resume, a confirm-gated stop, and a watch-face complication that carries progress and finish time.

The full matrix — platform minimums, rig computer requirements, and known limitations — lives in the docs.